The Automobile in the Fictional Life of One Man during the late 1970s: John Updike's "Rabbit is Rich"

 Sometimes a book cover reveals an important theme in a book, and that is certainly the case with the image above. "Rabbit" Harry Angstrom has come a long way since his tale in "Rabbit, Run."  From a broken marriage now healed, to a checked work life that has settled into becoming a prosperous Toyota car dealer and a most importune time, this is a story of a middle-class man living in Reading, PA. In this episode Harry will take us on an urban road trip through his hometown, and the reader will probe in issues of moral ambiguity spawned by lust that does not go away with aging. It is a reflection of the theme of the automobile and American life during the 1970s, but this time it speaks volumes about the coming of Japanese automakers to America, and the benefits of those who saw the writing on the wall soon enough to act in their best interests.

Updike masterfully spins his prose about Rabbit's car: p.647.

His 1978 Luxury Edition liftback five door Corona is parked in its space {at Harry's Toyota dealership]. Called Red Metallic, it is a color more like brown, like tired tomato soup.  If the Japanese have a weakness, it is their color sense; their Copper Metallic to Harry's eyes is a creosote brown, the Mint Green Metallic something like he imagines cyanide to be, and what they call beige a plain lemon yellow.... Still, his Corona is a snug machine. Solid, big car feel, padded tilt wheel, lumbar support lever for adjustable driver comfort, factory installed AM/FM/MPX four-speaker radio.  The radio is what he enjoys, gliding through Brewer [actually the fictional Reading] with the windows up and locked and power-boosted ventilation flowing through and the four corners of the car dinging out disco music as from the four corners of the mind's ballroom.

This time Harry's road trip is not rural as in Rabbit, Run, but urban as the driver weaves his way through town. p.649.

As he sits in his sealed and well-assembled car the venerable city of Brewer unrolls like a silent sideways movie past his closed windows. He follows 111 along the river to West Brewer, where he once lived with Skeeter, then cuts over the Weiser Street B renamed after some dead mayor whose name nobody ever uses, and then, to avoid a pedestrian mall with fountains and birch trees the city planners put in the broadest two blocks of Weiser to renew the downtown supposedly..... Harry cuts left on Third Street and through some semi-residential blocks...to the diagonal main drag called Eisenhower, through the sector of old factories and railroad yards. Railroads and coal made Brewer.

The road trip continues through page 655.

As Rabbit continues, he is propelled by music and the car radio, including Donna Summer's song "Hot Stuff."  It's lyrics mirrors Harry's lustful thoughts:

Hot stuff

I need hot stuff

I want some hot stuff

I need hot stuuuuuuff!